Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (SSEE), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), GGKP Annual Conference

While it is acknowledged that asset stranding could jeopardize the political feasibility of climate policies, the amount of stranded assets is rarely made explicit in most decarbonization pathways. This paper introduces a novel method that extracts, for every given energy sector transition scenario, the implicit amount of new power generation capacity that is added every year, and the required amount of stranding if this scenario is to be in line with its projected generation mix.

Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (SSEE), United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment), University of Oxford

Over the course of the last two decades, the issues surrounding technological innovation, investor behaviour, and business resilience have become magnified in the context of environmental change. This has helped to bring forward the issue of stranded assets as a sustainability concern beyond regulatory action on competition policy. This paper, produced to help inform an International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and UNEP Inquiry collaboration with policymakers in China, examines the risks and opportunities associated with stranded assets, provides five international case studies, and identifies how these issues might be relevant to Chinese policy makers.

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The GGKP was established by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment), and the World Bank to identify and address knowledge gaps in green growth theory and practice.